Pathetic Liberals at Newsweek Recycle Wimp Cover — and Drag Me Into It This Time

Jul 30, 2012

RUSH: And now I’m in a controversy with Romney. Newsweek magazine, Tina Brown’s magazine, now owned Barry Diller. Newsweek: “The Wimp Factor — Is Romney just too insecure to be president?” There’s the Newsweek cover. I want to take you back, October 1987, Newsweek, same magazine, “George H. W. Bush: Fighting the Wimp Factor.” They’re just recycling. Tina Brown is simply recycling a 1987 cover, George Bush running for president the first time taking over for Ronaldus Magnus, fighting the wimp factor, and now here Romney, Romney, the wimp factor. Is he just too insecure? Now, what’s this about? Well, let’s go to the audio sound bites and find out. This morning on CNN Starting Point, the hostette, Soledad O’Brien, spoke with the guy who wrote the story that Romney is just too insecure to be president, Michael Tomasky. And she said: “Do you think you create a strong argument for the wimp factor as opposed to a personal attack framed around the wimp factor?”

TOMASKY: The heart of the piece centers on the positions that he takes, the way that he has pandered so consistently on important, important issues, issues on much we’d like to see our politicians have some kind of consistency, some kind of backbone. He’s repeatedly just changed positions completely and pandered totally to the right wing. When Rush Limbaugh says, “Jump,” he says, “How high?” I think it’s a fair question to ask, is this the kind of person that we want to see in the White House?

RUSH: How lame is this? You people can’t fool us. You people at Newsweek are pathetic. You recycle something from 1987. It’s just a theme. You guys have your playbook. It’s divided by years. You think enough years have gone by. You had a cover back in 1987: George H. W. Bush, “wimp.” Let’s go forward to 2012: Mitt Romney, “wimp.” And because when I say “Jump,” he asks “How high?” Let me tell you what this is, folks. This is an attempt by Newsweek to soften you up. This is not aimed at Democrat voters. This is aimed at you, Romney, the flip-flopper. And the reason they’re doing this is because Romney is being profoundly successful in refuting and keeping alive Obama’s idiocy. “You didn’t build that. You didn’t make that happen. You didn’t do that.”

That got really under their skin. So now it’s time to go after Romney. But to throw me in here. I’ve never called Romney, and I’ve never said “jump.” Not yet. I haven’t done that. But this is all part of the plan. Calling Romney a wimp is aimed at suppressing the white blue-collar vote. Blue-collar voters hate wimps. You know, the working white voters that Obama has abandoned, and now whose votes they’re trying to suppress, this is all about trying to make those people think that Romney is a wuss. That’s why they’re getting Clinton to go to the convention, get some gravitas and to also try to suppress the working white vote that is abandoning Obama.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You really have to laugh, the desperation here of Tina Brown and the people at Newsweek in trying to portray Romney as a wimp. We’ve all seen Obama throw a baseball. He looks not even as good as an average girl throwing a baseball. He went out there, I think it was in Washington, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch, or maybe it was Chicago, “Cominskey Field,” as he says, wearing mom jeans. Guy goes out there wearing mom jeans and looks like a girl. And there’s a new book out, by the way, by a guy named Richard Miniter. It’s called “Leading from Behind.” And it’s about how Obama’s a wimp. It’s about how it required three efforts to get him to pull the trigger to get bin Laden. He canceled the bin Laden kill three times at the urging of a woman, Valerie Jarrett. The idea that Romney is a wimp, I hate having to even spend time on this, but they bring it up. You gotta deal with it. If anybody comes off as a wimp in American politics… You gotta send Bill Clinton in there to cover for Obama’s wimpishness?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: It really is a laugh, try to remember Newsweek calling George H. W. Bush a wimp. Bush was the youngest fighter pilot in the US Navy, World War II. I don’t know how many close combat missions he shot. He was shot down in the Pacific. Until very recently, he used to celebrate his birthday by jumping out of airplanes. He didn’t use a stunt double. I was there one year when he did it, the year I met Gorbachev. The year that birthmark of Gorbachev’s ended up on my forehead for a day. That was in Houston. I mean this really is a stretch to call Romney a wimp, to throw me in there. I don’t give Romney orders.

I tell you, folks, what this really is all about is something we started discussing last week is the effort to suppress Romney voters. That’s all they can do. That literally is all they’ve got. And James Carville and the Weekly Standard, it’s been reported, a fundraising e-mail that was sent out by the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee, and Carville had a serious warning, said, “We’re gonna have to go through hell and high water to win this damn thing.” And the remedy, of course, is to send more money to the Democrats. He said, “I wish I had good news for you. I want to tell you that President Obama has a second term in the bag. I want to tell you that the Koch Brothers are giving up their plot to buy the election.”

They have nothing they can do. They have nothing they can do to promote Obama. Nothing about his record, as you know. So they really can do nothing more than try to suppress elements of the population that are gonna vote for Romney. I mean, even Dan Rather, this wimp business. Beltway Confidential: “‘The Presidential race is flat, relatively uninteresting, even boring,’ Rather complained on his Facebook page. ‘Neither of these candidates seems to really like or have a deep passion for campaigning,’ he added, noting that Romney and Obama were nothing like Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. ‘I canÂ’t remember a campaign when both major party candidates seemed to dislike campaigning as much as these two,’ he continued.

“Noting that the conventions were about to begin, Rather speculated that perhaps Romney or Obama would ‘get enthusiastic’ soon. ‘Obama is more likely to than Romney, in my opinion,’ Rather continued. ‘He had the mojo the last time, but has lost it somewhere along the way.'” So Dan Rather is concerned that Obama has lost the mojo. Carville is concerned, and Romney’s a wimp. Now, here’s Romney reacting to this wimp business. This was on Face the Nation yesterday. Jan Crawford, chief political correspondent, said to Romney, “Some of those views have sounded pretty hawkish, the way you’ve been talking in terms of Israel, your approach to the Middle East. But I want to show you, I just got a copy of the Newsweek cover that’s been gonna be hitting the newsstands tomorrow. Calls you a wimp. Have you seen this?”

ROMNEY: They tried that on George Herbert Walker Bush. He was a pretty great president and anything but. If I worried about what the media said, I wouldn’t get much sleep, and I’m able to sleep pretty well.

CRAWFORD: Has anyone ever called you a wimp before?

ROMNEY: I don’t recall that, no. (laughing)

RUSH: So that’s how Romney chose to deal with it. Over on CBS This Morning today, show host Charlie Rose brought in Bob Schieffer to talk about the Newsweek magazine cover that calls Romney a wimp. Bob Schieffer’s excited as he can be about this. Charlie Rose said, “Does a magazine cover make a difference?” We’re talking about what may be the last Newsweek cover ever. They’re gonna stop publishing this thing. It’s gonna become digital only. “Does a magazine cover make a difference?” Here’s what Bob Schieffer said.

SCHIEFFER: I think, you know, if you gave Governor Romney some truth serum and people in his campaign, I mean nobody has told me this, I think they would probably say they are concerned about this. I mean this article was savage. It was brutal. How could you not have some reaction to it? When you put something like this article into the narration of the campaign, it sort of gives people ideas. It plants suggestions. So for sure, this did not help Mitt Romney. And my feeling is it probably hurt him.

RUSH: (imitating Schieffer) “And I hope it did, I really hope it did. I’m so excited, we got a good narrative going out there now. Thank you, Newsweek.” Bob Schieffer’s happy. You put a good narrative out there. Romney’s a wimp. And he continued. He was so excited, he couldn’t contain himself.

SCHIEFFER: People in the Bush campaign that year decided they had to do something to make George Bush appear more manly, so they went to New Hampshire, and he started driving heavy machinery, you know, big tractors and big trucks and tooting the horn driving around, and got his picture taken doing all that. I remember doing a story there that said, you know, hide the forklift, mama, George Bush is coming. The other part of it is, it worked. He won.

RUSH: Yeah, it didn’t hurt that the loser, Dukakis, in order to try to keep up — you want to talk about the real wimps, Dukakis jumps into a Beetle Bailey army helmet and hops into a tank and tries to make himself look all manly and tough, and he looked like a wimp. He looked out of place. It became the biggest joke of the campaign. And all they’re trying to do is re-create this because they don’t have anything else. The Obama campaign is almost devoid of anything positive. That’s why they’re bringing Clinton in, by the way. One of the reasons they’re bringing Clinton in, Clinton lies very well. He is an accomplished liar. Clinton lies in such a way that you enjoy being lied to, they think. And they’re gonna bring Clinton in there at the convention. In fact, they’ve moved Biden back a day to accommodate. Clinton’s doing the keynote.

Clinton’s gonna go in there and try to make — at least this is the prepub now — Clinton’s gonna go in there and try to make the case economically for Obama. Now, if he’s gonna do that, he’s going to have to lie. It wasn’t very long ago they were trying to tell us that Romney was a bully. Yeah, for supposedly beating up that supposedly gay student back in his prep school days. Remember that? Yeah, back in the prep school days he was a mean, nasty, bully, Mitt Romney, went in and beat up the poor young gay boy. Now he’s a wimp? He evolved, I guess. They’re just all over the place. Look, as I say, folks, sometimes I get fed up even having to mention this stuff. But they put it out there. And it’s wise to try to refute it at some point.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Jerry in White City, Oregon, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Oh, good morning, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: Yes, I just wanted to make a small point that it’s absolutely laughable for the defender of the most booty-whipped president in history to be out calling anybody a wimp. But that is specifically what they do. They have a problem, they blame somebody else, accuse somebody else and take the attention from themselves.

RUSH: (laughing) I know, it’s a bunch of metrosexuals. These bunch of guys, you wouldn’t want one of them in a foxhole with you and here they are out there, booty-whipped — I know what you mean by that. Richard Miniter’s book is about the fact that Obama was booty-whipped. Valerie Jarrett said no, three times, don’t get bin Laden. He was talked out of it three times by Valerie Jarrett.

CALLER: Well, we all know who runs the White House, at least the domestic side. Michelle’s pretty much got that part of his life under control.

RUSH: She won’t even let him eat what he wants to eat. The guy has to leave the White House and go to the Burger Brothers place or whatever it is. I think the only reason he has foreign leaders come to town is an excuse to get out of the White House and go to Mickey D’s.

CALLER: Yeah, but the left has been doing that since at least the sixties.

RUSH: Yeah, I know.

CALLER: They’ve got a problem, they accuse the right.

RUSH: What they do, as you well know, they spend their time accusing us of who they are. They spend their time accusing us of doing what they actually do, but it really is laughable. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago they’re calling Romney a bully for beating up this poor gay guy at prep school. Now he’s a wimp, and all they’re doing is recycling a 1987 Newsweek cover, which, as Bob Schieffer had the point, didn’t work back in 1987. It didn’t work. So it’s typical of these clowns to go back to something that didn’t work, ’cause that’s all they got.